Business Plan on Pyrolysis of Waste

Over the years, I have helped well over 100 students, from 4th grade to graduate school, with their papers on renewable energy or sustainability more generally. I enjoy the living heck out of, and I’ve gotten some of the most heartwarming thank-you notes anyone could possibly imagine.  Here’s what I got this morning (though I wasn’t of much help):  I’m a student of under graduate level from India and willing to take part in a business plan contest. I’ve chosen pyrolysis as the plan. This concept is known to few and India has very few pyrolysis plants. Can I get more details and videos about pyrolysis as a b-plan which would help me to win this contest?

I’d love to help you, but I don’t have anything that isn’t the property of one of my clients.

Here’s a section from my last book, but it’s very general. As you can see, I’m not a fan overall.  There’s a reason there are only a few pyrolysis plants in India (or anywhere else) as I’ve tried to explain here:

The energy challenge facing humankind is really simple: it’s capturing the energy from renewable resources (mainly the sun) in the most efficient, least-cost manner possible and funneling it into three main areas: buildings (lighting and HVAC), industry, and transportation, the last of which is about 30% of the total; that’s a big number.

Right off the bat we can see that this is bad news for things like biofuels. Let’s take algae, which is clearly the best of all conceivable feedstocks, as it contains 30 – 50 times more energy per unit of mass than any terrestrial plant. However, building scalable plants to grow and process algae has proved to be an insurmountable challenge thus far, and there is very little reason for hope that the future will bring a change here.

This is essentially because of the basic thermodynamics associated with living organisms; they didn’t evolve to store large quantities of energy they don’t need for their metabolic processes. Organisms are built to survive and reproduce, not to store extra energy for us to put in our gas tanks. Even if I am wrong here, the progress of solar and wind, as discussed above, is happening at an incredible rate–more than fast enough to make the subject of algae (and thus all other biofuels) moot.

I’m not saying that all investors in biofuels are fools. Biofuels can play a role in delivering clean energy, at least for the next few decades, but that role will be limited, particularly in the light of increasing demands for food, water and arable land with which such cultivation is likely to compete, as climate disruption further threatens future food security.

There are, however, biomass resources which can be deployed for energy production with minimal adverse impacts such as the use of waste food, food by-products such as vegetable peelings, farm manure and sewage for the production of biogas via either anaerobic digestion or gasification technology. Anaerobic digestion also produces valuable fertilizer for the cultivation of next year’s crops alongside energy, and removes weed seeds and pathogens. Solid biomass by-products such as straw and tree bark from forestry operations can also be deployed for energy purposes. As a general rule, solid biomass is probably best deployed for heat in the form of cooking fuel in the developing world, and space / industrial heat production in the developed world.

A modest production of liquid biofuels can also be achieved in a sustainable manner with that fuel possibly best deployed in the activities where few alternatives exist to liquid fuels. For example, it is hard to see how long-range air travel could be achieved as a commercial activity without the use of liquid fuels.

Waste-to-Energy

Let’s close this chapter by re-enforcing what I said here about waste-to-energy. In and around some of the world’s largest cities is an enormous source of bio-energy in the form of municipal solid waste (MSW); Bangkok, Thailand, for instance, the world’s 29th largest city, generates 14 thousand tons per day. This presents numerous problems in terms of land use and threats to human health. Using advanced technologies in thermal anaerobic gasification, we have the potential to get rid of all this waste and simultaneously generate significant amounts of power.